Sheltering Rain (2 page)

There were lots of officers. The Brougham Scotts' wide palazzo terrace, which overlooked Hong Kong harbor in the rare moments when the mist at the top of the Peak cleared, was a sea of whites. Inside the house, under fans whirring like huge propellers, Chinese staff also dressed in white topcoats moved silently between them in soft shoes, proffering long iced drinks on silver trays. Murmuring voices rose and fell above the music, which itself seemed muffled by the heavy, wet heat. The Union Jack pennants, strung across the ceiling points, hung like wet washing, barely moving despite the contrived breeze.

Pale and luscious, and seemingly as limp, Elvine Brougham Scott was reclining on a damask-clad chaise longue in the corner of the marbled drawing room, surrounded, as was habitual, by a corps of attentive officers. She wore a plum-colored silk dress with a sweetheart neckline and a long, gathered skirt that fell in folds around her long, pale legs. (There were no sweat marks under her arms, noted Joy, pressing her own close to her sides.) One of her shoes—trimmed with a joke ermine—had already been kicked onto the floor below, revealing Elvine's scarlet toenails. Joy knew what her mother would say, when she saw her, while biting back her own frustration at not being Barbara Stanwyck enough to wear it herself. Scarlet Woman lipstick was as close to vampish as Alice got, although it wasn't from lack of longing.

Joy and Stella deposited the song sheets and nodded a hello, knowing Mrs. Brougham Scott would not want to be interrupted. “How will we hear the ceremony?” said Stella, anxiously, glancing around for the wireless. “How will they know when it's begun?”

“Don't worry, my dear, hours to go yet,” said Duncan Alleyne, bowing as he passed, in order to check his watch. “Don't forget they're seven hours behind in Blighty.” Duncan Alleyne always spoke like the R.A.F. hero in a war film. The girls found it laughable, but Alice, to Joy's disgust, seemed to think it turned her into Celia Johnson.

“Do you know she has to accept “the lively oracles of God?” said Stella, rapturously.

“What?”

“Princess Elizabeth. In the ceremony. She has to accept the “lively oracles of God.” Haven't a clue what they are. Oh. And she has four Knights of the Garter attending her. Do you think they might possibly look after her real garters? She does have a Mistress of the Robes, after all. Betty Warner told me.”

Joy stared at the faraway look in Stella's eyes. Why couldn't she feel as transported by the occasion? Why did the thought of the evening ahead fill her only with dread?

“Oh. And you'll never guess. She has her breast anointed with holy oil. Her real breast. I wish it wasn't the wireless so we could see if the Archbishop actually touches it.”

“Hello, Joy. Gosh—you look—you look—actually, you look rather warm. Did you have to walk here?” It was William, blushing at his own approach, his hand extended limply in an unconvinced attempt at greeting. “Sorry. Didn't mean—I mean, I walked. Too. And I'm terribly damp. Much damper than you. Look.”

Joy swept a tall pink drink from a passing tray, and gulped at it. It wasn't just Princess Elizabeth laying down her life for her country today.

T
here had been rather a few tall pink drinks by the time coronation hour approached. Joy, who tended to get dehydrated in the humidity, had found the tall pink drinks slipped down rather easily. They didn't taste alcoholic, and her mother's attention had been elsewhere—torn between the rictus Toby Jug grin of Duncan Alleyne, and her fury at her own husband's apparent enjoyment—so it was rather a surprise to her when Princess Elizabeth's face, fixed high on the dining room wall, suddenly multiplied, and appeared to be grinning in complicity at Joy's attempts to walk a straight line.

Over several hours the noise of the party had gradually risen and swollen, filling the hosts' substantial ground floor, their guests' voices greased and elevated by the copious supply of drinks. Joy had grown progressively more withdrawn as the evening had drawn on, lacking the social skills for talking about nothing that these events seemed to require. Joy was apparently good only at losing people, not captivating them. William she had finally shaken off, telling him she was sure Mr. Amery had wanted to talk to him about business. Stella had disappeared, swallowed into a ring of admiring naval officers; Rachel and Jeannie, the other two girls of her age, were seated in a corner with their twin Brylcreemed beaux; and so freed from the opprobrium—or even attention—of her peers, the tall pink drinks and Joy had become rather good friends.

Realizing her glass was somehow empty again, she glanced around for another houseboy. They appeared to have vanished—or maybe it was just that she was finding it hard to distinguish their bodies from anyone else's. They should have all worn Union Jack jackets, she decided, giggling to herself. Union Jackets. Or little crowns.

She was dimly aware of a gong banging, and Mr. Brougham Scott's laughing tenor attempting to summon everybody around the wireless. Joy, leaning briefly against a pillar, waited for the people in front of her to move. When they moved, she would be able to walk out onto the terrace and breathe in the breeze. But at the moment their bodies kept swaying and merging, forming an impossible wall.

“Oh, God,” she muttered. “I need some air.”

She had thought these words had been spoken only in her head, but a hand suddenly took her arm, and muttered, “Let's get you outside then.”

Joy, to her surprise, found she had to look up. (Joy rarely had to look up—she was taller than nearly all the Chinese, and most of the men at the party.) She could just about make out two long, grave faces looming at her, swimming above two tight, white collars. A naval officer. Or two. She couldn't be quite sure. Either way, one of them had her arm and was steering her gently through the crowd toward the balcony.

“Do you want to sit down? Take deep breaths. I'll get you a glass of water.” He sat her on a wicker chair and disappeared.

Joy gulped in the clean air, as if it were water. It was getting dark, and the mist had descended on the Peak, shrouding the house from the rest of Hong Kong Island. The only clues that they were not there alone were the distant, rude honking of barges traveling through the waters below, the rustle of nearby banyan trees and a faint waft of garlic and ginger, whispering through the still air.

It was this smell that suddenly did Joy in. “Oh, God,” she muttered. “Oh, no . . .”

She glanced behind her, noting with relief that the last of the partygoers were disappearing into the room with the wireless. And then she leaned over the balcony and was lengthily and noisily sick.

When she finally sat up, her chest heaving, and her hair stuck sweatily to her temples, she opened her eyes to find, to her horror, the naval officer standing in front of her proffering a glass of ice water.

Joy couldn't speak. She simply looked at him in mute horror, and then buried her face, now flooded with embarrassment, in her glass. Perhaps, she prayed, suddenly, uncomfortably sober, when she looked up, he would be gone.

“Would you like a handkerchief?”

Joy kept her face down, staring grimly at her too-tall shoes. Something unmentionable was stuck in her throat, refusing to descend despite her repeated attempts to swallow.

“Look. Here. Take it.”

“Please go away.”

“What?”

“I said, please go away.” Oh, God, if she didn't leave soon, her mother would come out to find her, and discover her. And then all hell would break loose; she could hear the chapters ahead: 1. She Was Not Fit to Be Taken Anywhere; 2. The Shame of Her Behavior, or Why Couldn't She Be More Like Stella?; 3. What Would People Think?

“Please. Please just go.”

Joy was aware that she sounded rude, but the horror of possible discovery, as well as being stuck there having to make polite conversation while there might be goodness-knows-what splashed on her blouse—on her
face
—made it seem a lesser ill.

There was a lengthy pause. The sound of loud exclamations, overlapping, rose and fell from the dining room.

“I don't think—I think it would be better if somebody kept you company for a bit.” It wasn't a young voice, not the excitable braying tones of most of the officers; yet it didn't have the basso profundo of a lengthy association with power. He couldn't be higher than officer rank.

Why doesn't he go? thought Joy.

But he just stood there. His immaculate trousers, she noted, had a small splash of something orange on the left shin.

“Look, I'm much better now, thank you. And I really would rather you left me now. I think I might go home.” Her mother would be furious. But she could say she had felt ill. It wouldn't be an outright lie. It was only this man who would know the truth.

“Let me escort you,” he said.

There was another buildup of noise from inside, and some high, slightly hysterical laughter. A jazz recording began and ended just as abruptly.

“Please,” he said. “Take my hand. I'll help you up.”

“Will you please just leave me alone?” This time her voice sounded harsh, even to her own ears. There was a brief silence, and then, after a never-ending, breathless pause, she heard the sound of his footfall on the terrace as he walked slowly indoors.

Joy was too desperate to feel ashamed for long. She stood, took a long draft of the ice water, and then walked briskly, if a little shakily, toward the house. With a bit of luck, she could tell the staff and escape while they were all listening. But as she walked past the doorway of the drawing room, guests were already beginning to filter out. A teary-eyed Stella, the corners of her eyes drawn down in disappointment, was among the first.

“Oh, Joy, can you believe it?”

“What?” said Joy, dumbly, wondering how quickly she could walk past her.

“The bloody, bloody wireless. What a day for it to break. I can't believe they've got only one in the house. Surely everybody's got more than one wireless.”

“No need to fret, Stella, dear,” said Duncan Alleyne, one hand fingering his mustache, the other lingering on Stella's shoulder just a little too long for his professed brand of paternal interest. “It won't take long for one of the men to go and fetch one from the Marchants' house. You'll hardly miss a thing.”

“But we'll miss the whole beginning. And we'll never get to hear it again. There probably won't even be another coronation in our lifetime. Oh, I can't believe it.” Stella was properly crying now, oblivious to the guests around her, some of whom had evidently regarded the sacred ceremony of kings as a rather irritating interruption to a perfectly good party.

“Stella—I've got to go,” Joy whispered. “I'm really sorry. I'm not well.”

“But you can't—at least stay until they've got the wireless.”

“I'll call for you tomorrow.” Swiftly, seeing that her parents were still in the group that sat unnoticing around the dead wireless, Joy ran for the door. Nodding briefly to the boy who let her out, Joy was out, alone in the damp night air, with only the whining dive-bomb of the mosquitoes to keep her company, and the faintest of misgivings about the man she had left behind.

T
he expatriates of Hong Kong were used to living well, with an almost nightly schedule of drinks and dinners, so it was not uncommon for there to be few
gweilo
faces around first thing in the morning. But Joy, whose unfortunate accident with the pink drinks had left her feeling remarkably clearheaded on waking, found herself in the rare position of being a minority of one.

It was as if the whole of the Peak were suffering a hangover. While pairs of Chinese men and women trod softly past, some bearing heavy baskets or dragging trailers of rubbish, there was not a white person to be seen. Outside the white-painted houses, set back from the road, streams of colored bunting hung apologetically, and pictures of the smiling princess curled from windows, looking themselves exhausted from the excesses of the night before.

Padding around the teak-floored apartment, both she and Bei-Lin communicating in whispers (neither wanted to wake Alice and Graham, whose feverish, rambling arguments had stretched long into the early hours), she had decided the only thing for it was a trip to the New Territories so that she could go riding. Everyone would be spiky-headed and miserable today; and the wet heat pressed down harder than ever, magnifying hangover headaches, and ensuring that the day would be spent in a bad-tempered torpor, stretched out under fans on the soft furnishings. It was not a day to be in town. The problem Joy faced was that this was the one morning in which there was no one around to take her out of it.

She had walked to Stella's at around ten, but the curtains had been drawn, and she hadn't liked to call in. Her own father, who could usually be relied upon to drive his princess, would be unlikely to rise before midday. Not having many friends, there was no one else she felt comfortable calling upon. Seated on a wicker chair by the window, Joy toyed with the idea of taking a tram to the center of town, and then catching a train, but she had never done it alone and Bei-Lin had refused to accompany her, knowing that the mistress would be in an even fouler temper if she awoke to find the help had gone off on a “jaunt.” “Oh, God save the bloody Queen,” muttered Joy at her retreating back.

Not for the first time, Joy felt mutinous at the restrictions of her life, both geographical and physical. In the short time she and her mother had lived in Australia, shortly after the Japanese had invaded and the women and children had left the colony, Joy had found herself the recipient of unheard-of freedoms. They had stayed with Alice's sister, Marcelle, the doors of whose beachfront house had seemed permanently open, free for Joy to walk out, and for a variety of neighbors, all of whom seemed so relaxed and cheerful compared with those in Hong Kong, to walk in.